Where to start.
First off I’d like to explain something to those of you out there who haven’t had the pleasure of working in a biological laboratory, or had the pleasure of doing lab work in general.
This is directed at the people I run across in the store, gas station or other random places I go to after work and notice the ID badge I forgot to take off.
We, and by this I’m speaking for 95% of the people that I work with, do no do “All of that cool Star Trek stuff”. WE DON"T DO THAT STAR TREK STUFF!!! THE COOLEST THING I"VE DONE IS WATCHING BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES CHANGE COLOUR OVER A 4 HOUR PERIOD. SCIENCE IS A LOT LIKE COOKING! YOU SIT YOUR ASS DOWN AND FOLLOW THE RECEPIE.
To those of you uninitiated in scientific research it may sound like this glorious high tech field where you basically sit around and do really cool things with really high tech pieces of machinery… Trust me the novelity wears off when you’ve been running permutations of the same experiment for 2 months.
Sure, wearing all the protective gear in the BSL-3 labs is fun. You look kinda cool wearing the mask, plastic back facing gown and double gloving it. However, as a rule those gowns have wrist cuffs that are always three inches to small. So as the hours go by in the windowless, noisy BSL - 3 lab which lacks a clock you slowly feel your fingers grow cold as the blood flow to your hands gets cut off not only by the cuffs but by the two layers of gloves. Because lets keep in mind that while a pair of latex gloves when worn as a single layer may be nice and tight and not slip when you place a second glove over the first suddenly the glove is a lot tighter… Fancy that. However nobody ever told me that reduced blood flow to your hand causes that muscle at the base of your thumb to get tired. Which is a funny co-incidence since thats the muscle you use all the time under a containment hood when you pipet samples. Those of you familiar with carple tunnel syndrome know what pains in your wrists and hands feel like. This feels quite similar, however it keeps getting sharper and sharper as the muscle gets more and more ‘exhausted’. But you cant stop. So all you want to do is work faster.
Faster is not your friend when dealing with extremely pathogenic P-3 virsues. If mr.monkey didn’t like getting this virus I don’t think I’d like it either. I remember my safety training. They showed me a video with a bunch of MDs talking about working with HIV. They kept talking about how much they respected the virus. I respect people. People who have grace, poise, leadership and skills I don’t posses. I don’t respect a collection of basepairs and amino acids that has evolved into the biological equivelent of the Terminator. That scares this shit out of me.
Back on topic…
What people don’t fully understand that as a lab tech you do, for the most part rotiune tasks such as make media, ensure the trash is out, glassware clean lab stocked. You also run experiments. Most of them require very little skill. A monkey could do 75% of my job. I’d probably have to show him how to use the mouse to graph data, but on the other hand he wouldn’t be able to read so he’d be more productive. The only problem is that it seems the Animal Rights people ensured that the monkey has a better union and working conditions.
They monkeys get banana flavored pellet treats. I get my choice of 8 wonderful beverages from the vending machine. Country Time lemonaid??! How can it be called lemonaid??? IT HAS NO LEMONS IN IT. IT TASTES LIKE LEMON SENTED KITTY LITTER. DIET 7-UP??!?!?! all the enjoyment of the taste of normal 7-up but without the redeeming quality of SUGAR!
GODDAMN EACH AND EVERY HEALTH NUT IN THE WORLD SUGAR IS A FUNDAMENTAL IN OUR DIETS.
Look, if you are going to remove sugar from everyone’s diet you might as well stop making solid food and just start making a 500 ml IV bag that contains all of the nutrients in a complete meal. It’d taste the same as diet 7-up, not have any goddamn sugar, and would have the added bonus of forcing us three times a day to play that school yard favorite “FIND THE VEIN”.
Speaking of finding the vein, I was having a TB test a few months ago when the Nurse/tech/poorly trained person dropped the needle. Naturally I responded this how anyone else would. “Gotta catch the thing that person dropped! Wait, its pointy, that would hurt don’t try to catch it.” End result I watched the needle fall about 2 feet and land in my palm.
The tech then removed the needle and threw it away.
This said needle landed in the meaty part of my palm, ya know the muscle that hurts from all the pipetting. Now let us reflect on the wisdom of that. A TB test is done on the inside of the forearm, slightly below the wrist. A used needle is ‘contaminated’ and reusing a ‘contaminted’ needle is ‘bad’. However, if this needle became ‘contamined’ from being plunged irresponsibly into my palm isn’t the flesh there EXACTLY THE SAME IF NOT CLEANER THAN THE FLESH OF MY FOREARM. AT LEAST I WASH MY HANDS MANY, MANY, MANY TIMES A DAY.
(for those of you who may wish to argue this, a) the injection was being preformed in my non-dominate hand and I had NOT touched anything since it had been last washed with a laboratory grade microbial handsoap for the requisite 3 min.)
So now I had to wait for her to get more TB serum, while the small child in the exam room next to me continued to have experimental exploritory abdominal surgery without anestesia. Did I mention the godawful smell comming from the sharps container in my exam room? Sometimes you just gotta throw those suckers away before they get full.
I keep going off on a tangent.
Monkeys… I was talking about monkeys.
And Animal rights people. Two groups I really despise.
First off, I hate monkeys, apes, chimps, baboons whatever. If its a distant relative of humans we like to hide in the closet most of the time, at least until company comes and then we dress it up real cute and make it do tricks I HATE IT.
THEY ARE"T PEOPLE! STOP PUTTING THEM IN DIAPERS AND MAKING THEM ACT LIKE PEOPLE. If I wanted to see a smelly semi intellegent mammal try to use a computer I’d GO TEACH HIGH SCHOOL. For the love of god, stop putting them on TV or in movies. THEY AREN"T CUTE, the smell, throw fecees and make MASSIVE amounts of noise.
Speaking of the smell, I work at a facility that has primates. Picture this: Summer, no wind and no clouds so the hot hot sun is beating down. The primates have large outdoor pens with everything a primate could want to entertain itself. Ever smelled a monkey after it was outside running around in 90 degree weather in full sun? And for you animal rights people, thats not cruel. THE GODDAMNED ANIMALS COME FROM AFRICA!!! Africa is one thing in the summer, HOT AND SUNNY. Nobody should have to go to work at some obscene time in the morning, open the car door and be greeted by the smell of WARM FERMENTING MONKEY. On the plus side I don’t drink coffee anymore. If I can survive driving to work, that smell will keep me awake.
Ok, sorry animal rights workers for leaving you out of the tirade for so long. I understand you are doing what you think is right, and, much like anti-abortionists who kill abortion doctors in return for killing human lives, HAVE YOUR HEADS SO FAR UP YOUR ASSES DAYLIGHT IS A LEGEND LOST IN THE SANDS OF TIME HANDED DOWN FROM PARENT TO CHILD.
Why are you wearing leather shoes? YOU EVER SEEN HOW CATTLE ARE TREATED? I have. Infact, I had the opertunity to play cowboy for a little while and herd cattle. Do you know what cattle like to do in a wide open pasture, when there are about 100 of them allowed to roam over 1000 acers? They like to roll around in their own shit, or if they are the intellectuals of the herd they eat it. Their other past time is CHARGING PEOPLE ON HORSE BACK. However the horse is smarter than the cow/bull/whatever. The horse knows that the rider on its back had legs, legs which dangle over each side of the horse. And legs, to a horse, are nature’s air bags. They are soft, kinda roundish, and deflate if struck at high velocities thereby cushioning the blow. Somewhere in Montana there is a video of me on horse back, sunburned, dehydrated, lost, hungry and suffering from severe alergies kicking at the head of a cow trying to get it to turn away as it angle in to ram me. Yeah, lets not eat beef its cruel to the cows.
THEN WHY THE HELL ARE YOU WEARING SHOES MADE WITH LEATHER!
Oh its a waste of resources.
Do the math, we have enough airable land in America to raise enough cattle for twice our population to have 2000 kcals a day of fresh, raw, bloody beef until the end of time. (Actually enjoyed that ecology course.)
Dear Animal Rights people, please endure this for I have more to say. So much more.
You are against animal testing. I understand some needlessly cruel things have been done in the name of product testing. But if you are against it and want it all to stop, THEN WHY DO YOU USE MEDICAL PROCEDURES THAT RESULT FROM ANIMAL TESTING?
If you actually followed your asine docterine we’d be letting premature infants die left and right since many of the equipment and ___ (that drug which works to keep the lungs/airways open which I can’t remember) were first developed by aiding newborn primates bred in research institutes. What about most of the therapudic drugs, many of them were tests on animals.
GAH it makes no sense, “stop doing that right now, its cruel!” Then you get sick, “HELP ME I NEED SAFE DRUGS TESTED ON ANIMALS TO MAKE ME GET BETTER”…
And lastly. I work around primates. Have you ever seen a full grown chimp or baboon? They can climb around a wire cage faster than you can run using only their two little fingers. Keep in mind these animals can weigh over 40 kilos. Can you climb up a wire fence only useing your pinkies?
Now imagine this hypothetical. You see this poor abused lab chimp. This chimp fears humans, since humans bring it pain. You decide to free it, let it nolonger live a life of fear and pain. So you open its cage to let it out. You open its cage as other people have before they caused it pain. Only this time, you don’t move to secure the animal, the animal can move freely. All it sees is its open cage and a human, as experience tells it this means there will be pain shortly. But it is free, you are not restricing its movements. Now you have a 40 kilo animal capable of climbing by its pinkies rushing at you. Who do you think will win this fight? That Abs of steel tape ain’t gonna help you now.
Now, after they find your torn and bloody corpse the animal needs to be put down.
Wow, you really saved that creature.
I leave you with this: The vast majority of scientists are caring responsible people. Those of us who work with primates are scared of them, you should be. The vast majority of lab work can be done with blood samples. But most importantly, the vets are better doctors than those on the approved list for our health care plan.
Lastly I’d like to touch on the nature of chemists and chemical supply companies and the relationship they have with biologists.
To highlight this relationship I shal be discussion BSA, or for those of you who are organic chemists: Serum, Albumin, Bovine: Faction V.
BSA is commonly used in tissue culture work. Enough so, that all of the protocol handbooks and text books in biology refer to it as BSA. I mean everything. However the chemical supply company doesn’t. This isn’t a large problem, unless you take the following situation.
Take me, a lab tech. I’m in on a sunday, almost every sunday I’m at work since I need to continue working on the experiments. However since we are all saleried we don’t get overtime, which isn’t a big problem since many days I can spend 2 hours typing this up and doing the crossword puzzle. However it is sunday, and I’m the ONLY person in the lab complex. I need to add BSA to some reagents and then use them in a tissue culture. So I look for the BSA we have. Nothing is labeled BSA. Nothing has the words in it that would appear to form BSA. This is fairly important since it must be mixed with human cytokines (keep in mind that a large vial of this runs around 45,000 dollars so I really shouldn’t screw this up). In school nobody ever mentioned what BSA stood for. So I go to the reagent catalogs and look up BSA. And thank god there is a listing. It says see Albumin… What the hell is Albumin, so I go look that up. Now I go to the Albumin section. Its fairly large and has a lot of similar sounding yet different compounds. I eventually locate the ones for BSA. However there is a problem. There exist about 8 different BSA possibilities, and I have absolutly no clue which is the correct one to use this. Flash forward 3 hours, after researching this on the internet and trying to get through to the tech support line for the supply company. I then remember that only one bottle in the tissue culture fridge was labled Albumin… God I am a MORON.
SIGMA, WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST ADD (BSA) TO THE LABEL??!?!?!? WOULD IT BE THAT EXPENSIVE? YOU ALREADY CHARGE 30 DOLLARS A LITER FOR WATER!
And I’d like to end this most random of rants with a comment on crossword puzzles:
WHY AM I SO STUPID! Gah, even the crossword puzzle which I assume is for the mentally handicapped is too hard for me (the non New York x-word). Though a combination of inability to spell and genetically linked crossword-learning disability even that one is almost impossible. During lunch, 3 PhDs, a graduate student and 3 lab techs couldn’t figure out the 4 letter word for a carbon compound.
Yeah, the 120,000 I spent on my BA in Biology was well spent. Thank god I don’t have to pay that much for my PhD.
And I am spent.
Much like yesterday’s tirade about driving (which incidently is only 4 miles and takes less than 9 minutes even during the heaviest traffic [heavy downpour with visibility under 3 fee] so I don’t think is really commuting) this has been boiling over for several months and in some cases years.
The urge to kill people when sitting next to them on the plane attempting to read an important scientific journal article which makes no sense and uses words nobody ever needs to know (exsanguination!?!? [spelling?] how about drew blood) will turn and ask about what you are reading. Eventually they will drag out the hated bit of information, “Biology” or worse “Virology” which prompts the explaination of what it is. This always seems to result either in a description of either a flower, plant or some nasty bit of personal hygene that I did not wish to know. I do take some satisfaction in being able to say, “Sorry no clue, not my field.”
I suppose thats why I get along when I end up sitting next to MDs, I don’t ask innane questions about their profession. I understand stand that being stopped by a random person outside of a professional setting is annoying. How would a plumber or cable repairman like having every person on the street asking them how to fix their “-----”.
So, anyhoo. Thanks for letting me finish venting, and unless something really heinous happens (I’m picturing hazmat getting called to identify a suspicious substance… “Umm we’re a P-4 facility sir, we usually get anthrax delivered”. Granted its normally labled.) I’m done with my venting and will hopefully begin to contribute random and semi-pertinent comments to other threds and won’t continue to use this as my person agony aunt.
Take care, and remember that its not the way you say “NO” its the weapon you’re pointing at them that sends the message.
Who cares if the one you have is bigger. Mine’s coated in the blood of the last person who annoyed me.
